Saving Fishes

The father of this little family is a rabbi, head of a yeshiva (Jewish school). He is intense and serious; his day is filled with prayer, study, and teaching. One day, a student alerts him to an opportunity to fulfill a strange and counterintuitive commandment (mitzvah): “If you chance upon a bird's nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, and the mother is sitting over the fledglings or on the eggs, do not take the mother together with her young. Let the mother go and take only the young” (Devarim 22:6).

Menachem, the rabbi’s young son, a sincere and loving boy but not an eager scholar, is interested in the mother bird and her young. He has watched the nesting process from the window of the yeshiva and smiles at the hatchlings’ daily developments. When he learns that his father has shooed the mother away, he worries. He does not understand why God would require anyone to separate the young from their mother.

His father’s answer is somewhat harsh, and it made me consider my own thoughts on God, commandments, and our responsibility to fulfill them. You must fulfill the commandment, he warns, without asking, “What is the reason?” He warns, too, that performing a seemingly merciful act that is not commanded in the Torah is simply doing an evil disguised as a good. It may seem merciful, in other words, to allow the mother to nurture her young, but God commanded the opposite, and what could possibly be more merciful than God?

Menachem has animals on his mind when he asks about the mother bird. A few days before, he saw a woman being taken from her apartment building in an ambulance, in critical condition. Her dog remains faithfully by her side, whimpering and crouching, obviously in distress. That night, Menachem asks his father whether dogs “have a soul.” They have nothing, his father answers, “no soul, no commandments, nothing.” When he and his father bathe at the Dead Sea later in the summer, Menachem again takes mercy on an animal, his wide eyes revealing the feelings in his heart. He has learned, of course, that there are no fish in the extremely salty Dead Sea, yet he is certain he has seen some. These fish, his father explains, swim in from the fresh springs and streams that feed the sea, but they quickly die. Menachem takes a plastic bag and sets about saving a fish , catching it in a stream before it reaches the harmful salt. But his plan goes awry, the knot in the bag loosens, the water spills, and the fish flounders on the muddy shore. An uncommanded merciful act gone awry, perhaps—just like his father the rabbi warned.

This family is the center of an Israeli film called Chufshat Kaitz (“Summer Vacation”). The film touches on many themes, but the question of commandedness lies at its center. The rabbi is certain of his actions; he performs mitzvot each day and says the proper blessings at the proper times. But his own certainty fails him when, in pursuit of the distressed fish, his son, unattended because his father is busy at prayer, wanders alone into the salty sea and drowns.

The notion that Menachem is punished for performing an act of mercy for an animal, an act not commanded by God, is ludicrous. The notion that it is the rabbi who is punished for his inability to see beyond the letter of the law is ludicrous. If one cannot believe in a God who commands us and then holds us, harshly, to those commandments, can we believe in a God at all? Why do we observe holidays and worry about the “repair of the world,” why do we go to synagogue, if we are not commanded to do so?

Talking about this at all already makes me feel a little uneasy. In many communities I belong to, “God” isn’t a usual topic of conversation. There’s an underlying suspicion about God. Are we talking about reward and punishment? Are we talking about hearing voices? Are we talking about denying evolution and enforcing fundamentalism on everyone?

I know I am in rabbinical school, but I am still ambivalent about answering questions about God, commandments, and my personal relationship to both. But just last week, I remembered the feeling I had when I was a child, and I believed in God though I didn’t think so much about it then. I remembered feeling comforted and relieved, not afraid and pressured. And when I re-watched the film Usshpizin, I found words to express that feeling: joy, gratitude, wonder, intimacy.

The couple in this film came to their religious practice later in life, and their prayers seem to have a more direct relationship to their daily lives than the scheduled prayers of Menachem’s father. Moshe and Mali are childless and poor; nothing seems to be going right for them, and Moshe assumes it is all a “test” from God. I don’t want to discuss the entire film here, but in a key scene, the couple receives a sum of money—well-timed, right before the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. When a man pushes the stuffed envelope under her door, Malki immediately sees this gift as a response to her prayer (“Give us a miracle.”). Dancing in her kitchen, Malki raises her arms and her eyes to God and sings: “For You are holy, and Your name is holy.”

I don’t want to argue that God does not command us, or that performing mitzvot isn’t important. But in my own mind and heart, I feel the mercy young Menachem yearns to demonstrate to the dog and to the young birds and to the fish to be God, to be the fulfillment of a commandment. I find God in moments like the one Malki responded to with such love and gratitude, and I don’t just mean “miracles.” I have never received an envelope full of money under my door, and I have rarely prayed directly for something that subsequently was granted, just the way I asked. But there have been times when I feel alone, in despair, left out, and weary. Suddenly, something happens that reminds me that I am not alone, and I am pulled back into the flow of the community. For example, on one of my first Shabbat evenings in Jerusalem, I went to an Orthodox synagogue for the first time, and I felt lost and conspicuous. And then the congregation sang a song I have always found comforting, in a familiar melody. It is the same song that Menachem’s community sings on the shores of the Dead Sea when a helicopter hovers above, looking for a sign of life that never comes: “Esa einai el he-harim. Me-ayin yavo ezri? Ezri me’im Adonai, oseh shamayim va-aretz,” “I lift my eyes to the mountains. From whence will my help come? My help is from Adonai, the maker of heaven and earth.”

I can remember moments when I felt certain of my relationship with God: crying in my childhood bedroom at the death of my grandmother, standing on a mountainside in Colorado looking at a faraway snow-covered peak, saying the words “I am gay” out loud to another human being for the first time, standing at the Kotel. Trying to decipher what these moments have in common, I think most of them point to a feeling of being called into relationship (with a family member, with a stranger, with the Jewish people) and of being called into that relationship truly and completely as myself—no pretenses, no lies, no adaptations to please others. And for me the notion of God and commandment means that, when a moment like this happens, the tears well up in my eyes, and my heart is full of passion, and I simply feel grateful.

In the song Malki uses to express her gratitude, the lyrics argue, “This culture is not for us, for there is fire in our hearts. […] And I am small, the last of the people, standing here excited, very excited.” Unlike Moshe and Malki, whose Haredi (Orthodox) lifestyle cordons them off from secular Jerusalem society, I don’t believe that this culture, a pluralistic world, is not for me, but sometimes I do feel like there is fire in my heart. And I do not think I am small or I am nothing, but I do acknowledge that the world does not begin and end with me. I want the fire in my heart to lead me to gratitude, like Malki’s joyful dance. And I want it to lead me to mercy, like Menachem’s compassion for the dog and his worry for the hatchlings. I want God and commandment and my own passionate response to lead me to scoop the fish up from danger, and to tie the knot stronger this time.